Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) (2 page)

Though I never knew Antonio Machado well my recollections of him are so sharp as to be almost painful. I remember him as a large sad fumbling man dressed like an oldfashioned schoolteacher. Stiff wing collar none too clean; spots on his clothes, and the shine of wear on the black broadcloth. He had a handsomely deep voice. Always when I think of him he is wearing the dusty derby he wore the evening we walked around Segovia in the moonlight.

Segovia is one of the walled mountain towns of old Castilla. It is full of arches. A Roman aqueduct stalks across the city. There are Romanesque façades, squat towers, broad portals, all built of an umber and honeycolored stone. Every detail of the carved stonework stood out sharp in the flaming moonlight.

We had been sitting in the stale old casino that smelt of anise and horsehair sofas and provincial ennui. We had sat watching a game of billiards and talking about Whitman and Emily Dickinson until suddenly we had to get out of doors. A couple of other men joined us for a stroll around the city by moonlight. It was unbelievably beautiful. I remember how pleased Machado was with the names of the streets and the churches.
San Millan de las Brujas
—Saint Millan of the Witches—delighted him particularly.

Machado himself was living then in a shabby lodging on a street called
Calle de los Desamparados
—Street of Abandoned Children. He couldn’t have had an address more characteristic of him. A lonely widower, in his forties I suppose, he gave the impression of being helpless in life’s contests and struggles, a man without defenses. There was no trace of worldliness about him. Long ago he had accepted the pain and ignominy of being what he was, a poet, a man who had given up all hope of reward to live for the delicately imagined mood, the counterpoint of words, the accurately recording ear.

Machado el Bueno, his friends called him. Indeed he struck me as good in the best sense of the word, a man entirely of one piece. He followed his chosen calling with the simplicity and abnegation of a monk. Early he must have vowed himself to poverty.

His
Campos de Castilla
particularly made a great impression on me. I was a gangling foureyed young hobbledehoy just out of college, making my first independent effort to master a foreign language. Somebody had
given me an excellent piece of advice: when you are trying to learn a foreign language always read the poetry before you try to learn the prose. Of course poetry that’s worth its salt carries the essence of the language. So I carried Machado ‘s
Campos de Castilla
with a dictionary around in my pocket for months. Even today when I try to dredge up some Spanish, it is Machado’s Castilian that I remember. A language dry, spare and luminous. Its music is austere and plain. Eloquence is avoided at all cost. The homely carefully cadenced words are so stuffed with feeling that they throb. Sound and image are woven together to an extraordinary degree. Some stanzas seem almost more pictures than poems; rereading them I find myself renewing the excitement of my first touch of Spain.

The Spain of Antonio Machado’s time was the Spain of what was known as “the generation of ’98.” Defeat in Cuba and the Philippines had fired a fresh crop of young men with a determination to renovate their country at any cost. Their hopes for education, for social justice, for freedom of speech and thought and action still glowed with the warm light of nineteenth century idealism. While their friends planned miracles in social progress, the poets discovered miracles in the tradition-laden villages, the bare landscapes, the harsh dignity of the peasants and drovers and muledrivers who people the Spanish countryside. The bare wheatlands of Castilla were Machado’s special domain.

Most of the men I got to know and esteem during those early trips to Spain met their ends in the civil war. Their hopes died with them. In Paris, after the collapse of the republic, they told me that Antonio Machado, already ill and broken, had been hustled into an ambulance carrying refugees to the border. He died in exile a month later in the French village of Collioure.

Even as a child, Antonio Machado sought death, the dead and decay in every recess of his soul and body. He always held within himself as much of death as of life, halves fused together by ingenuous artistry. When I met him early in the morning, I had the impression that he had just arisen from the grave. He smelled from far away of metamorphosis. A pit of worms did not disturb him, he was so familiar with it. I think he felt more repelled by smooth flesh than by bony carrion, and butterflies in the open air seemed to him almost as enchantingly sensual as houseflies or flies of the tomb and train,

A poet of death, Antonio Machado spent hour after hour meditating upon, perceiving, and preparing for death; I have never known anyone else who so balanced these levels, equal in height or depth, as he did, and who by his living-dying overcame the gap between these existences, paradoxically opposed yet the only ones known to us; existences strongly united even though we others persist in separating, contrasting, and pitting them against each other. All our life is usually given over to fearing death and keeping it away from us, or rather, keeping ourselves away from it. Antonio Machado apprehended it in itself, yielded to it in large measure. Possibly, more than a man who was born, he was a man reborn. One proof of this, perhaps, is the mature philosophy of his youth. And possessing the secret of resurrection, he was reborn each day before those of us who saw him then, by natural poetic miracle, in order to look into his other life, that life of ours which he reserved in part also for himself. At times he passed the night in the city, in a lodginghouse or family boardinghouse. To sleep, after all, is to die, and at night we all lie down for our share of dying. He never cared to be recognized, and so he always walked enshrouded when he journeyed through the outskirts of towns, along passageways, alleys, lanes, and stairways; and at times, he may have been delayed by a stormy sea, the mirrors in a railroad station, or abandoned lighthouses, those standing tombs.

Seen by us, in our half-false light, he was corpulent, a naturally earthy hulk, like a big stump just dug out of the ground; he dressed his oversized body in loose-fitting black, ocher, or brown clothes in keeping with his extravagant manner of living death; a new jacket perhaps,
hurriedly bought in the outdoor market, baggy trousers, and a completely frayed all-season overcoat, which was not the proper size; he wore a hat with a sagging threadbare brim, of no particular period, since death-life levels styles and periods. In place of cuff links he wore little larva-like cords on the cuffs of his huge shirt, and at the waist, for a belt, a cord of esparto, as would a hermit of his kind. Buttons? What for? His were the logical practices of a tree trunk with roots already in the cemetery.

When his only love died in Soria de Arriba, she who so well understood his transcendental role as a border dove, he had his idyl on his side of the boundary of death. From then on, he was master of all reason and circumstances; outwardly a widower, he set up his bridegroom house in the grave: a secret dovecot; and then he came to the world of our provinces only for the sake of something urgent: a publisher, the press, the bookseller, a necessary signature...the war, the terrible Spanish war of three centuries.
Then
he completely abandoned his death and his most intimate dead, and remained an eternal season in everyday life, in order to die again, like the best of the others, to die better than the others, than we who are more attached to the side of existence that we have accepted as life. And no final death could possibly have been more appropriate to his strange, earthly Spanish life; so much the more now that Antonio Machado, alive forever in an invisible presence, will never again be reborn in his own spirit and body. When bodily death came, he died humbly, miserably, collectively, the lead animal of a persecuted human flock, driven out of Spain—where he as Antonio Machado had had everything, his dovecots, his sheepfolds of love—through the back gate. In this condition he crossed the high mountains of the frozen frontier, because such was the way his best friends, the poorest and most worthy, made the crossing. And if he still lies under the ground with those buried there away from his love, it is for the comfort of being with them, for I am certain that he who knew the rough uneven path of death has been able to return to Spain through the sky below the ground.

All this night of high moon—moon that comes from Spain and returns to Spain, with its mountains and its Antonio Machado reflected in its melancholy mirror, moon of sad diamond, blue and green, in the palm tree of violet grassy plush by my little door of the true exile—I have heard in the depths of my waking-sleeping the ballad “Night Rainbow,” one of Antonio Machado’s most profound poems and one of the most beautiful that I have ever read:

In the eternity of Spain’s evil war, which joined her in a monstrous and terrible way with the other eternity, Antonio Machado, with Miguel de Unamuno and Federico García Lorca, all three so alive in death—each in his own way—have gone, in a different, lamentable, and yet beautiful manner, to look upon the face of God. Great it would be to see how God’s face, a foremost sun or moon, shines on the faces of the three who have fallen, more fortunate perhaps than we others, and how they are seeing the face of God.

Spain of the twentieth century was a nation of extraordinary poets, each distinctive and original. The most beloved of those poets, then and now, is Antonio Machado. He is the quietest, the least pretentious, the most subtle and amusing in aphoristic skepticism, the deepest in the spirit’s labyrinths, the freshest in voice, and the plainest in clear, landscape vision. Don Antonio of Sevilla and the provincial cities, of Madrid and internal and foreign exile, would be the first to ignore these superlatives, yet the cognomen
Antonio el bueno
(Antonio the good) sticks with him
¹
.

The poet read and loved philosophy. But he iterated many times that logic doesn’t sing. Machado sings in all his poems. In early poems of shadow and sun, in long poems about harsh Castilla, in fragmentary mountain songs, even in philosophical lyrics when he hauntingly plays with metaphysics: “The eye you see is not / an eye because you see it. / It is eye because it sees you.” Look carefully at his minimal speech, for he fools you with spinning insights. He tells us that the eye of the other already is, and not because by perceiving it you render it living, but because it is there waiting to come into more apparent being by seeing you. In waking you to its being, it gives you life. And you are companions. Like the world, the eye is on its own. And the world and the eye will go on being, when you are darkness.

Often in his landscapes, as in a Chinese Taoist painting, the author seems to disappear because scene is all. Even the live figures in the field participate in a vibrant still life—a black bull, two slow oxen plowing, a man with a crease on his forehead walking behind the beasts, a rainbow
of birds, a stork sitting absorbed in the sky over a spire. Yet behind the vision, the poet is there, guiding you, walking with open eyes filled with memory of poplars by the river, a dry elm waiting for resurrection, and the Espino hill on which he wheels his dying wife. Or, on a cobbled street in an ancient Castilian village, he tramps alone at midnight by night jasmine, by the illuminated clock on the town hall, a moon at its zenith, all in the severe solitude of his widowerhood. When you walk with blind open eyes in his fields, you have disappeared with the poet.

Antonio Machado began to write his first poems in the last years of the nineteenth century. He was a Spanish poet already aware of his French counterparts Baudelaire and Verlaine and the Americans Whitman and Poe, all of whom represented the new poetry. The late Spanish romantic Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer also left his mark in the early sensitive, intimist poems of elusive love, a city pastoral landscape, and youthful melancholy. But the avant-garde voices of Rimbaud and Mallarmé had not yet crossed the Pyrenees into Iberia. Then came the earthquake of Spain’s war with America in 1898. It took a decade before that catastrophe permeated Spanish letters. Yet already in Machado’s second book,
Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems
(1899–1907), the poet moves from the subjective and sensitive young poet, who recalls unrequited love, kitsch European melodies, and the shadow of gallows and graveyard, to being the observer and critic of a traditionalist, fraudulent Spain marked by greed and anger in the countryside and political office. The history of Spain and contemporary intellectual artistic movements come self-consciously into his poetry. He has a powerful social agenda, at times rhetorical and journalistic, for creating a new Spain. A few of his poems take on the ethical lexicon and tones of the Generation of ’98. In these national aspirations he is prophetic. At least in the arts, the new self-awareness and energy will help fuel a cultural renaissance.

The Generation of ’98 had a violent political origin. When the United States defeated Spain, quickly and decisively, certain Spanish intellectual elements began to waken from the lethargy of long national decline, of passivity and an imitativeness of France, which earlier in the century had humiliated the nation when Napoleon 1 invaded and occupied Spain in 1808. Goya responded with fury in paintings and engravings at the grotesque massacre of Spanish civilians and soldiers. A century later, an inflamed generation of writers and thinkers became acutely aware that
their country had again lost everything, and there was a response in the air—a demand for change.

A climate of defeat had beset the nation. Along with military disgrace, Spain was reduced territorially to the Iberian peninsula, with the exception of a few strips of land in North Africa. After centuries of decline, there were indeed few other signs of the golden chain of colonies, all now liberated and culturally rejecting Spain in favor of France. The
Siglo de oro
was long gone, and gold from the old Indian mines and plundered treasuries no longer poured in from the Americas to support an unproductive economy, one that could barely provide its people with bread.

While the new gods of the industrial revolution were winning Western Europe and North America to a faith in progress and prosperity, Spain was still castles, beauty, churches, landless peasants in Andalucía, and a skeletal industry in the north. There remained the cartoon version of the nation: Bizet’s colorful
Carmen,
a French dream of gypsies and toreadors: glittering, romantic, and utterly cheap and unreal. In truth the countryside was a medieval relic, feudal in land ownership, but at the same time the village and city life were fascinating for the emerging naturalist novelists who examined the lives of peasants and the other classes in this time-warped ancient nation. Spain had known Phoenicians, Greeks, lews, Romans, Visigoths, and Arabs who came to inhabit this Celtic-Iberian peninsula. The old structures were everywhere: a great functioning Roman aqueduct in the center of Segovia, Moorish watchtowers on the coast and the great mosque of Córdoba, a medieval synagogue in Toledo and the whitewashed Jewish ghetto of Sevilla, medieval and renaissance buildings in Salamanca, built on Roman foundations. Not least was the diversity of peoples, languages, and customs of prideful Catalans, Castilians, Andalusians, Galicians, and Basques.

Popular culture was alive and even preserved by the insignificance of industry and the stagnating economy. (Unfortunately there is a universal inverse relationship of growth between folkloric culture and economic prosperity.) Antonio Machado’s father, Antonio Machado Álvarez, was himself a folklorist, the founder of the Spanish Folklore Society, as well as the first anthologist of the lyrics of flamenco song. Popular culture was also celebrated in the festivals. To this day Spaniards still celebrate the
Semana santa
(Holy Week) of Málaga, with its floats carrying embellished statues of the Virgin and accompanied by the
penitentes,
men parading with crosses in white robes and high conical hats, alongside priests and uniformed
guardias civiles.
This is followed a week later by the celebration of the
Feria de Sevilla,
with its dancing
sevillanas
in the
casetas,
the bulls, and the aristocratic horsewomen riding as elegant, anachronistic dolls in
the morning streets. Everywhere and in full strength was the
canción anónima
(popular song), which, with the exception of a brief period of total Italianization in the early sixteenth century, had nourished even the most
culto
(culturally European) of Spanish poets. Yet eternal popular culture aside, in 1898 the nation as a whole lay impoverished after its civil wars and seemed removed from Europe, ensconced behind the isolating walls of the Pyrenees.

Of this Spain drifting into the twentieth century, the esteemed novelist Arturo Barea wrote, “Her fertile but mismanaged lands were exhausted; the country was short of bread. And she was plagued by earthquakes, epidemics and flood which seemed to herald the Apocalypse in the eyes of the bewildered masses”
²
. Fifty years of church burning and those exhausting Carlist wars between traditionalists and liberals (
liberal
as a political term was invented in Spain) had preceded the military defeat of 1898. Spain had dissipated prestige and hegemony. It was no longer the dominant power of Europe as when it ruled Austria, parts of Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, most of the two continents of the Americas, even the Philippines.

Yet just at this low moment of national stagnation, the dynamic beginnings of a new Spain came on the scene. There was an influx of literary and social ideas from abroad and an explosion of Spanish talent that led to rebirth in all the arts. Perhaps a just comparison can be made with the emergence of the great novel in nineteenth-century Russia at a time when the nation was similarly characterized by feudal landowner-ship, abysmal government, and conflicting Russian and Europeanizing cultural currents. In Spain, soon the blossoming would become self-nourishing, leaving the initial ’98 impulse and programs behind.

Spain became a nation of world composers, painters, musicians, and four Nobel laureates in literature. In music there were the composers Falla, Albéniz, and Granados, all very Spanish as they were European, and Andrés Segovia who made the guitar an essential Spanish and classical instrument, and Pablo Casals who for most of his nine decades made his cello a favor to the world. The twentieth century would bring the painters luán Gris, Joan Miró, Dalí, and Picasso. In Barcelona the eccentric, brilliant Catalan Antonio Gaudi was a secret world figure of architecture in the early 1900s.

In literature the sense of renovation was messianic. A group of literary men, who identified with the national problems, set out on quixotic
missions to rediscover the soul of Spain. Students, artists, and intellectuals went abroad to bring back new ideas.
Within
Spain the provinces were discovered: landscapes in Antonio Machado, Azorín (José Martínez Ruiz), and Miguel de Unamuno; the popular song and ballad in Machado and later in Lorca and Alberti. Popular culture became legitimate raw material for art forms. The so-called primitive authors were resurrected: the medieval poets Gonzalo de Berceo, Juan Ruiz the archpriest of Hita, and Jorge Manrique. Spanish philosopher-essayists Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset were engaged in labors of reexamination and rebellion, critical introspection, and re-evaluation.

The decay in the national life did not of course automatically disappear upon being articulated by a group of ardent scholars, artists, and philosophers. Azorín wrote essay after essay calling for hard work and the exertion of
la voluntad
(the will). In politics the figures of ’98 had no single party or program—they did have an influential professor, Francisco Giner de los Ríos, founder of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institution of Learning), which educated many leading intellectuals, including the Machado brothers. Azorín, with his usual thoroughness, listed the evils against which his generation was rebelling:

Few have better expressed these conditions of dismay and hope with more rhetorical mastery than Antonio Machado in “Una España joven” (“A Young Spain”), a poem vividly infused with the spirit of ’98 in good and not-so-good ways. It has the stentorian slogans of his programmatic poems of ’98, which stand in contrast to Machado’s essential poems that sing an image before the poet’s eyes or in bright memory. To the detriment of the poet’s name, his declamatory poems figure disproportionately high among those favored for comment and anthologies. They define a literary movement and period. But they are not Machado’s song. “A Young Spain” echoes the traditional “ship-of-state poem,” with its origin in
famous paradigms in Alcaeus and Horace, and modernly in Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” His anthem is strong, devout, and trite:

However, most of Machado’s poems reflecting the ’98 ethos depict old stark villages and cities, and the peasants, fields, and mountains around them. Machado’s
Fields of Castilla
(1912) was, and still is, an ideological focal point, containing a few celebrated poems of mystical bombast as well as his enduring poems of land and people, which are at the heart of his volume. In those days Spaniards were obsessed with nationalist concerns, asking,
“What is Spain?”
Pedro Salinas, an outstanding poet of the Generation of 1927 and a seminal critic of Spanish literature, captures the spirit and preoccupations of the time:

The devotion of those of ’98 to Spain had nothing to do with jingoism or exaggerated patriotism. It was precisely the hollow ring of the chauvinists’ rhetoric that they abhorred and that Azorin decried. It is
ironie that in the act of strong repudiation, some of their writing today should appear rhetorical and chauvinistic. However, they were set on discovering the “eternal” elements in the Spanish tradition, and this turned them to study Castilla, its grave and hermetic plateaus, the heart of Spain. Unamuno and Machado were the poets most associated with the discovery of Castilla, its isolated cities and depopulated
páramos
(harsh steppes). In their enthusiasm for Castilla, however, the writers of ’98 ignored Galicia and Catalunia (each busy with its own self-discovery in its own language). They even forgot about Andalucía. But the younger poets of the Generation of ’27 expanded the national vision to include Spain’s various distinct regions. There was Alberti’s exquisite minimalist lyrics about Cádiz and its port life; Lorca’s dramatic songs and ballads, including a series of moody poems he even wrote in
gallego,
the Portuguese dialect spoken in Galicia, and Aleixandre’s childhood city of Málaga, which in his pulsing verse is the “shadow of paradise.” Such provincialism with respect to Andalucía is odd, for most of the major Spanish poets of the twentieth-century rebirth are Andalusian—Antonio and Manuel Machado, Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, Luis Cernuda, and the two Nobel laureates, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Vicente Aleixandre.